


The Old Man From 304

by Kyrakat



Category: Scorpion (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:06:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3577254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyrakat/pseuds/Kyrakat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happy just wants to get a decent night sleep but her neighbor is an asshole. Apartment AU/origins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Man From 304

“Hey, asshole!” Happy Quinn yelled, punctuating her shout with a series of angry knocks. She quickly turned her fist sideways and began pounding on the door of 304. “Turn down your shitty old man music, grandpa!” she shouted again, and kicked the door with her untied steel-toed boot she had quickly pulled on before clamoring down the stairs.

The door violently swung open, forcing Happy to jump out of the way and completely throwing off her threatening stance.

“Hey, now, this is a classic,” said the man holding a laptop in one hand and turning up the volume with the other.

“More like a relic,” she deadpanned, folding her arms across her chest in an attempt regain a menacing appearance.

“Sorry, what was that? I can’t hear you over the music!” he yelled pointing to his ear. 

With a straight face Happy slammed the top of his laptop down, smashing his thumb in the process. He let out a grunt and transferred the now shut laptop to his other hand. She held her unamused expression.

“Ow.” he whined, shaking his hand and giving her an over exaggerated wounded look. “What was wrong with that song? Do you hate pure, unadulterated genius?”

“I don’t care about the quality of your damn music, some people actually want to sleep at 2 am. I’ve had the fucking Foo Fighters seeping in through my floor since midnight,” she spat the words at him.

“Wait, you’re upstairs? You’re crazy sex girl in 404? Oh man, do I know all there is to know about you!” said the man with awe in his voice. “It’s an honor to finally meet you, I’m Dr. Tobias Curtis, but you can definitely call me Toby...or whatever you want to call me, you dirty, dirty girl.”

“Excuse me?” Happy asked angrily. “I have already injured you once in this short exchange, are you sure you want to keep talking?”

Toby grinned and mimed zipping his mouth shut.

“Good. Now go the fuck to sleep before I knock you unconscious,” she said, almost smiling as she turned away to walk back up stairs where she could finally get some sleep.

-

Five hours later while she was brushing her teeth, Happy heard frantic knocking on her door followed by the hurried footsteps of running. With the toothbrush dangling from her mouth she whipped the door open where she was met with empty air. She looked down the drab hallway of her crappy apartment building, but still nothing. It wasn’t until she glanced down that she noticed the coffee and the note. The logo on the side of the paper cup told her it was from her favorite indie coffee shop across town, which was quite a drive but well worth it for the quality of brew. Walking back into her cozy apartment she set the coffee gently on her kitchen counter and opened the note.

_‘Thought you might need this. It’s black, like your soul. Love, the old man in 304.’_

-

After a successful day of job hunting Happy crawled into bed with a small smile on her face. Hours later, however, she was woken by a familiar song seeping through her floorboards. Without thinking about it too terribly hard she rolled out of bed and pulled on her boots. Muttering to herself she again clamored down the stairs to lay the smack-down on 304.

"Hey!" She yelled kicking his door. "What kind of doctor gets drunk and plays crap music until all hours of the morning on a fucking Tuesday?"

"A looove doctor," slurred Toby opening up the door and turning down the music. "How'd you'd know I was drinking?"

"We've lived in the same building for two years, and even though I never interact with anyone in this godforsaken dump, I'm still pretty sure you're always drinking,” she said, sleepily resting her hand on the doorframe.

He paused, staring at her intently.

“That is an astute observation,” he finally agreed and opened the door wider for her. “Would you and your two friends like to join me?”

Happy raised her eyebrows, but the direction of his eyes lead her to his meaning. In a flash she folded her arms across her chest, less so to seem menacing and more so to cover her tank-topped upper body. 

“Do you know that not wearing a brassiere to bed isn’t actually healthier than wearing one all the time? Apparently in the mid-nineties people started getting real concerned that everything was killing them, especially their clothes, and that wearing a bra everyday would constrict the lymphatic system and trap quote unquote toxins in the body,” said Toby with a genuine incredulous expression. “Can you believe that? The general public made mere speculation fact over buzzwords like ‘toxins,’ amazing.”

“Fascinating,” she deadpanned.

“I’m normally against the spread of false information but I should let you know that tonight I am overjoyed that this scare tactics imprint on society has lasted so long, because I think you’re a woman who normally likes support and would not normally go without. Probably because you never had a stable home growing up, am I right?” Toby asked, leaning on the door frame. “So you schedule out your life and obsessively stick to it. Not only that but you probably don’t have a whole lotta people in your life to disrupt your schedule which is why you’re down here trying to get me to shut up so you can go to bed on time so you can wake up on time so you can get to work on time so you can make money so you can buy extra supportive support of which at night you go without because you’re scared of quote unquote toxins.”

She blinked. 

“Gimme me a beer,” she said through gritted teeth, her hands balled into fists. Toby quickly, although not gracefully, flung his laptop on his couch and raced into the kitchen. She snatched it out of his hands before he could hand it to her.

“Now, I’m gonna drink this, right here in the hallway, to calm myself enough to be able to get to sleep,” she said, pulling a barrette from her hair which she used to open the bottle, “and then when I’m finished, I’m going to hit you over the head with it.” She took a rather long drink from the bottle. “Because what the hell, man? You can’t just talk to people like that. Even I know that, and I’m not exactly a people person.” 

“We could discuss all of my personality problems in my apartment, if you want…?” he said, pointing in what she assumed was the direction of his bedroom.

She shook her head and backed up to the wall across from his door. Sitting down and crossing her legs, she tried to ignore whatever grossness was on the carpet.

“We’re gonna figure out what your problem is out here, where the crack dealer down the hall will hear my screams,” she smirked, taking another swig.

“I know what my problem is,” Toby said, closing his door and sitting down across from her. “I’m a shrink, diagnosing ourselves was practically the first assignment at medical school.” He paused to take a drink. “Harvard medical school, to be exact.”

“Harvard to getting drunk on a Tuesday night sitting on a piss stained carpet with a stranger, huh?” She asked, bringing her knee up and lazily resting her arm on it so she could gesture with the bottle. Or more so to demonstrate that she could easily throw it at him at any time.

“You’re not a stranger, you’re kinky sex girl from upstairs,” he said, “You have daddy issues and don’t like to cuddle. You probably have your sexual partners -ahem, bootycalls- lined up until October in that day planner of yours to make sure you can have the most sex without having to see a person more than once a month. See, I know tons about you...”

“You don’t know my name,” Happy pointed out. Toby opened his mouth, thought about it, and closed it again.

“You got me there, kinky sex girl from upstairs,” he finally said with a grin.

“If you _must_ , call me Happy,” she said begrudgingly and took another drink.

“Oh, I get it, that’s funny,” he said genuinely. “Because you’re anti-social and angry and living in a shitty apartment with shitty neighbors, presumably with a shitty job and have to numb the pain that is your life by smacking guys around in the sack.” She stared daggers at him. “Don’t worry, I know it’s all very obviously consensual by what I’ve been hearing. But you call yourself Happy because you’re not, right? It’s funny.”

“Not right, not funny,” she said, pursing her lips together. “In fact you’re wrong about most of that. Except the first part about the shitty apartment and annoying neighbors.” She smirked at him, earning another grin from him. “And the consensual part. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Toby repeated with a chuckle, remembering the countless nights he would lay in bed laughing up at the ceiling because of the noises Happy’s men were making.

“My life is just peachy, comparatively,” Happy said, scrunching up her nose, as if just making this realization now.

“Compared to what?” Toby asked incredulously.

“Your life,” Happy laughed, hoping to distract him from the real answer: right in this moment her life was infinitely better than she could ever remember it being. Here she was, with proper prospects on her horizon, joking around and drinking with an actual real life person...even if it was this particular annoyingly pretentious person.

“Hey, now. I share my beer with you, turn down my music for you, and this is what I get? I’m a literal genius, I have a job interview tomorrow for somewhere other than a boring ass institution, my life is golden,” he said defensibly. 

“A genius huh?” Happy smirked and bit her lip, trying not to give him a full smile, as mocking as it would be. “You’d think a _genius_ would be smart enough to get a decent amount of sleep the night before a big job interview. That’s why I, a person with an IQ high enough to actually be considered a genius, was trying to get some sleep before my big job interview tomorrow.” Her voice dripped with dry humor.

“I knew you weren’t a normal!” Toby shouted, pumping his arms in the arm in self-congratulations. 

“Mechanical prodigy,” Happy said raising her beer bottle in a mock toast and giving him a patronizing, tight (and totally fake) smile.

“World class behaviorist,” he said, his voice hushed in awe of this smart, sexual woman who landed on his doorstep. For once in his life, he didn’t rattle off his degrees or act more cocky than he actually was. For once in his life he was almost, kind of speechless.

“Yeah, I got that,” she said, still trying not to smile at this complete mess of a man in front of her. “So, you keep getting fired, too, huh?”

“I prefer the term ‘cancellation of employment,’ and yes. But let’s not focus on that,” he said, getting on his hands on knees (and totally not tipping over his beer bottle in the process) so he could both look into her eyes and get closer to her. “Do you realize you just let me know something about your life without me having to pry it from you? Progress! I’m amazing.”

“If you don’t back up right now I’m going to hack into the apartment’s mainframe and cut your power,” she threatened, staring him dead in the eye. 

Toby just raised an eyebrow, obviously not that concerned. He stayed put so that his nose was only a few inches from hers.

She held his stare despite being uncomfortable with the closeness, but she was biding her time until he looked like he thought she wouldn’t make a move and he would have to choose which direction to take his face. She waited until he took a deep intake of breath, preparing himself to move forward. It was that moment that Happy hit the side of his face with the beer bottle hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to break the bottle. In fact, she barely spilled any on the already stained carpet.

“Oh, my pinna,” he said, rubbing his ear. “Okay, that’s what I thought, personal space issues. I won’t be trying that again, I like my head attached to my body, don’t worry.”

“You’re a pretentious douchebag,” she said, angrily standing up.

“And you’re just angry and like to hurt men because your dad left you,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and rational but not quite succeeding.

“You don’t know anything about me,” she growled, tossing the beer bottle at his stomach but making a point not to aim to hurt him, just so he’d catch it at a wrong angle and spill what was left on himself. Her body stiff with anger, she turned away to stomp up the stairs.

“We both know that’s not true!” Toby yelled after her. He stared at the place she had been sitting and rubbed his head again. After a minute he gave up hope of her clamoring down the stairs again, and picked up his discarded bottle sadly. 

Meanwhile Happy slammed her door and paced her tiny living room.

“I’m going to get this job, save up the money I need and then I’m getting out of here, away from that crazy shrink,” she muttered to herself. “With his psychoanalysis bullshit and his ugly hats and his...thoughtful notes and ability to see right through me.”

She groaned and collapsed on the couch and put her head in her hands. She was frankly exhausted, physically and mentally. Happy ended up falling asleep on the couch, in the same position Toby eventually drunk himself into a slumber downstairs.

-

Even after the events of the night before, Happy couldn’t help but give the doctor a tiny smile when his car pulled up to the garage. 

“Are you stalking me?” Toby asked with mock confusion on his face as he got out of his shitty car and grabbed his bag from the back seat, swinging it across his body.

“Come on, genius, put two and two together,” she said, her voice vastly different from what it was the night before. Not even her asshole neighbor could bring her mood down.

“Wait, my huge job interview is your huge job interview? Where did you even _meet_ this guy? He told me I basically had the job,” he said with actual confusion on his face. “And, no offense but we don’t exactly have the same qualifications or skill set.”

“Two different positions, Harvard,” she smirked, crossing her arms. “He told me he had, and I quote, a narcissistic ivy-league trained behaviorist coming in next, because honestly that is just my luck.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” he said, rubbing the side of his head where she had hit him yesterday. “Hey, listen, before I go in and rock this interview, I wanted to apologize for last night. I was drunk and trying to impress you or something by doing my crappy psychic trick that impresses the normals. I was being an idiot.”

“You were a jerk but technically you weren’t wrong,” she shrugged. “I need my space and my schedule, that’s true. And the stuff with my dad...yeah.” Happy stared at the ground and biting her lip, obviously uncomfortable with the entire exchange, but finally landing a job with an employer who understands her had her feeling off. She was happy, which she wasn’t entirely used to being, and if this guy was going to be working with her she might as well open up a little. He already seemed to know way too much about her anyway, so she assumed he would be the best to try to socialize with a little.

“Hey, that’s why we’re both here, right? Because this O’Brien guy claiming to have a 197 IQ, debatable by the way, has a genius safe-haven set up in a run down garage in the shifty warehouse district. I would not be out here risking my ass if I didn’t know that people like us need something like that,” he said taking a step closer to Happy, but still giving her her personal space. “We’re weird and we’re different and our lives tend to be super fucked up so we need our weird coping mechanisms and support systems to survive knowing so much about the world.”

She looked up at Toby and give him a small smile.

"You're going to be late, doc," she said, rolling her eyes good naturally and starting to her car. "Don't screw this up." 

"Aw, you want to work with me, I'm flattered," he said with a hand to his heart.

"Shut up," she laughed, opening her car door but not getting in yet. "And doc, thanks for the coffee."

Toby didn’t enter the building until the sight of her car disappeared into the distance.

-

Toby’s knocking quickly shifted from cutesy little patterns to obnoxious pounding on Happy’s door.

“I know you’ve looked through the peephole and are trying to determine whether or not to open the door, I swear I come in peace,” he said, holding a pizza box up so she could see. Happy stood on the other side of the door, her hand hovering above the handle. She took a deep breath, put on her most bored expression and opened the door.

“We already did this today,” she said, pointing back and forth from herself to him. Just because she allowed herself to be civil to the guy did not mean he could show up at her door unannounced. Even if she was starving. 

“But we haven’t celebrated yet!” Toby said excitedly. “We got jobs, jobs we probably won’t hate immediately, jobs where our intellect may not be ultimately wasted.”

“Hooray,” she deadpanned, opening up the box of pizza and taking out a piece while still very much trying to block his view of most of her apartment. “So we’re done here?” Happy asked, raising an eyebrow and taking a bite from her stolen pizza.

“Nope,” he said with that goofy, cocky grin on his face. He pulled out a joint from his pocket. “It’s 4:20 somewhere.”

Happy stared at him with the same bored expression for a few seconds before moving to allow him access to her home. He happily raced in, his head snapping in all sorts of directions, trying to see everything in her apartment at once. 

“Don’t touch anything.”

“Can my butt touch the couch?” he said, pointing to the couch and giving her large puppy-dog eyes.

“You may sit,” she said, walking past him into the kitchen where she smiled to herself. In the time it took her to grab plates and two beers from the fridge and turn around, Toby had already exploded over her house. His jacket was thrown over the recliner, the pizza box and his feet were both on the coffee table, and he managed to take up the entire couch. “Oh yes, please, make yourself at home,” she said sarcastically. 

He did just as she asked and grabbed the remote from the coffee table, switching on the TV. Happy threw him a beer, causing him to fumble around with the bottle and the remote while she gathered newspaper from the kitchen to put under the greasy pizza boxes.

“I think celebrity poker’s on, do you like poker?” he asked, genuinely, even though the screen already displayed washed up wrestlers and fake looking models staring over their cards at one another.

“Like poker, hate celebrities,” she said, making a move to sit on the recliner which would put her farther away from the pizza than she’d like to be, seeing as she already stuffed her first stolen piece into her mouth. However, Toby casually moved his giant freak of nature limbs so he was only taking up half of the couch.

“See, we have so much in common. These people have no idea what they’re doing and it actually physically pains me,” he said, trying to stay cool and collected about Happy actually sitting down besides him. He also tried to stay cool and collected and not sniff her hair when she leaned over him to grab a slice of pizza, but he failed spectacularly. 

The rest of the evening was spent getting comfortably high and making fun of the 2009 Miss America’s poker face. That was, until Happy got up to go to the bathroom, leaving her phone wholly unattended. He quickly guessed the password (she struck him as the person who updated their passcode almost everyday, which meant that the code was obviously today’s date) and couldn’t help himself from checking the contacts first. He wanted to be wrong about her, in fact after spending time with her he thought he HAD to be wrong about her. She was so fun, cool, obviously good in bed, and frankly gorgeous, there’s no way she was the friendless workaholic he pegged her for in the beginning. 

Except she only had five numbers in her phone, one of which was just named “NOT a drug dealer.” The other four were either male names accompanied with question marks or just descriptions of dudes like “guy who doesn’t think I’ve caught on to him calling me ~sweetheart~ just to get me to punch him in the face.” He smirked and added his own number into her contacts, naming himself “the old man from 304” to keep with her theme.

He heard the toilet flush and the faucet start so he immediately clicked away to something a bit more innocent.

“Hey, I hope you don’t mind, I hacked into your phone and am now going to judge your music taste on a very rigid point system that I definitely just made up,” he called back to her as she was walking back to the couch.

“I don’t really feel comfortable--oh you’re already doing it, okay,” she said, hopping up on the back of the couch so she could see what he was doing. “You don’t really get the whole personal privacy thing, huh?”

“Says the technical genius who should have had this thing tighter than my Aunt Glinda,” he said, waving the phone in her face.

“I’m smart enough to not put any personal details on that thing,” she said incredulously.

“Music is the most personal thing of all and you have an entire library here!” Toby said passionately. “Let’s see what hides in the soul of Ms. Happy...I don’t actually know you’re last name. But, you know what? I’m not gonna push it.” 

She just waved him along, letting him do whatever he pleased because trying to stop him would be more pain than it was worth.

“Are you shitting me, you saucy minx?” Toby said, mouth agape as he scrolled through her playlists. “AC/DC? Jet? The White Stripes? Ohhh Arctic Monkeys...and what’s this? Is this the fucking Foo Fighters?” He looked like a child on Christmas morning.

“Do you know that someone can like something and yet not want to deal with it at 2 am?” she asked, hitting his shoulder with her knee.

“I can’t believe we have the same taste in music,” his voice was full of awe, “I mean other than these shitty girl bands…”

“Hey, I heard ABBA coming from your apartment and you’re shitting on Bikini Kill, are you kidding me? Get out of my apartment,” her voice was playful but she pointed to the door.

“Oh c’mon, it’s only,” he glanced at his watch “3 am. Shit.”

“We have work in the morning,” she reminded him, the mere thought actually filling her with joy.

“Yeah we do,” he grinned at her. “Car pool?”

“Um, no. I’ve seen your car, I’m not getting into that death trap,” she said as if it was plainly obvious. “And you have to earn sitting in my car.”

“Excuse you,” he said getting up and stretching which to Happy’s disdain caused his shirt to raise up. She shifted her eyes to the ceiling. “My car is classic and is in almost pristine condition. Maybe some time I’ll let you look under the hood.”

“What an offer, but I’ll pass,” she said, using the couch cushion as a stepping stool down to the ground.

“For now,” he said, grinning.

She bite her lip and tried to hide her smirk by walking around him to open the door in a very “get out of my house” gesture.

“We both know that wasn’t a no, but I’m not gonna push it by mentioning that that wasn’t a no,” he said, spinning lazily to face her.

“See you tomorrow,” she said pointedly, giving him a fake, patronizing smile.

“And every weekday for the foreseeable future,” he said, bending over slightly to say it right in her face before quickly leaving before she could punch him. She closed the door and leaned against it. For once in her life, she wasn’t dreading her future.

**Author's Note:**

> That was way longer than it deserved to be, but these kids becoming best friends will never not be adorable. Eventually they do start to car pool and bring each other coffee and accidentally staying at each other's places and oops we're spending every hour of the day together how did THAT happen?? Also: I hate the term 'normals' but pre-Scorpion, pre-Paige Toby was an giant pretentious asshole so I mean.


End file.
